Friday, 28 October 2016

British
politics has surely never been such an extraordinary mess in the course of
modern history. And Brexit is right at the heart of it all.

The
referendum on 23rd June was of course a symbol of the chaos we were
already in, but also a harbinger of calamities yet to come.

And if you
want to see in microcosm how shockingly weird the landscape is now, pay a visit
to Richmond Park constituency in south-west London. This highly affluent seat
elected the even more affluent Zac Goldsmith to represent it in 2015, with a
phenomenal majority over the shattered Lib Dems.

I actually
had to double check the figures, because although I knew he’d won well, I’d
forgotten that Goldsmith clocked up a staggering majority of 25,000 in an area
previously held by Jenny Tonge and Susan Kramer.

Zac is
forcing a by-election and standing as an independent in protest at the
expansion of Heathrow Airport – a position no doubt supported by the majority
of Richmond residents, who live right under the flightpath and suffer endless noise
pollution.

But will they
be able treat the poll as a vote on the third runway?

Not if the
Lib Dems have anything to do with it. They want the by-election to be about
Brexit, as they know 70% of the local inhabitants were pro Remain in June,
while Zac backed the call for the UK to leave the EU.

Many Liberal
Democrats would like to see the result of the referendum overturned – a position
supported very recently by former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. The
argument is that we’re entitled to change of minds, now that we’re seeing the
full horror of Brexit. (Unfortunately, these proclamations coincide with the
horrific announcement of healthy economic growth and a horrific decision by
multinational car giant Nissan to invest more in their Sunderland manufacturing
facility.)

So what does
the Tory Party have to say about it all? They might surely want to defend their
decision to plough ahead with the third runway. And if they decided the
election wasn’t really about the runway, they would want to defend their ‘Brexit
is Brexit’ stance, wouldn’t they?

Actually,
they’re not going to stand a candidate at all.

Some think this is because they
want Zac to win and to thwart the Lib Dems, given their very small majority in
the House of Commons. Others suggest it’s because they want the by-election to
be some kind of oddity which means pretty much nothing.

And what
about UKIP, the party which arguably drove us towards the edge of the Brexit
cliff?

They’re not
going to stand either, as they’re in the middle of a period of internecine
conflict, which involves newly-elected leaders resigning and putative leaders
ending up unconscious in French
hospitals.

But Labour
must be standing, right?

Well, yes,
probably. Although high-profile members of their frontbench think they shouldn’t.

They believe
that Labour and the Lib Dems and the Greens could get together on some kind of ‘Reverse
the Brexit vote’ ticket.

There’s only
one problem. The Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell believe
that, err, Brexit is Brexit, even though they make fun of Theresa May for
claiming precisely the same thing. The veteran left-wingers at the top of the
party have always been anti the EU and no one really believed their Damascene
conversion.

Looking at
this by-election as someone who has observed British politics closely since the
beginning of the 1980s – and who’s participated in election campaigns as a
candidate – I freely admit I haven’t got a clue how all this will resolve
itself. It’s anyone’s guess. But at the moment, it’s an absolute dog’s dinner.

My challenge
to those Remainers who want to keep fighting the referendum result is this:
what exactly is the end game? I fear that no one actually has the faintest
idea, because this is a coalition of the highly confused.

There are
some people who would like the June 23rd result overturned, perhaps
in a second referendum. We made a mistake. Let’s reverse it.

It’s an
intellectually defensible argument, but political poison. It would tell all the
alienated and disengaged voters who defied the establishment that their vote
counted for nothing.

This would breed further discontent and the growth of the
far right.

There are
others who realise the political naivety of the second referendum, but believe
that Brexit can be blocked and obstructed in Parliament, where there is large
pro-Remain majority. The reality is that this is politically unacceptable too,
however justifiable it is at a legal or constitutional level.

There’s a
third group which hopes to achieve a ‘soft’ Brexit rather than the ‘hard’ leap
in the dark proposed by some fevered souls on right of British politics. I have
respect for this position, which is broadly my own view. I don’t, however,
believe that it can be achieved in a coalition with others who fall into
categories one or two. In other words, the soft Brexiters’ case will be quickly
undermined if their fellow campaigners are seen to be working to obstruct
Brexit entirely.

Reading the
tea leaves – and that’s really all that’s left right now – I feel that all of
this pain and confusion may be ended early in 2017. I suspect that Theresa May
will seek a mandate from the electorate to resolve these questions. She is so
far ahead of Labour in the polls that it is easy to imagine her achieving a
majority of 80 or 100 in a general election.

Under the
Fixed Term Parliaments Act, she needs a two-thirds majority to call a poll. But
McDonnell and Corbyn, in a whirl of collective delusion not seen since General
Custer took his stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, have signalled that
they are keen to contest an election. It is hard to imagine what pretext they
could find to vote against it in Parliament.

My bet for
the date? Frosty February. A month before May plans to invoke Article 50. My
hunch is that she may push the button with a mandate much stronger than anyone
anticipates.

Friday, 14 October 2016

Michelle Obama’s speech this week was extraordinary in both
its content and delivery. As many have observed, she is a highly credible
presidential candidate herself and brought to the campaign a raw emotional blast
against the abhorrent sexism and vulgarity of Donald Trump.

In a sense, the First Lady was doing what Clinton can’t.
With just a few short weeks until the election, Hillary cannot afford to be labelled
unfairly as a harridan or a man-hater. She
is conscious of all the baggage about Bill, which her opponent is happy to
dredge up at every opportunity. So while she agrees with everything that was
said this week by Mrs Obama, she needed someone else to say it.

The speech was about sexism and the treatment of women. It
will rightly be remembered long after this tawdry and tortuous campaign season
is over. But there’s another shadow that hangs over this election, as we all
know. And that is the stirring of ugly racist sentiment – not just by Trump
himself, but by a coterie of supporters and hangers-on, who see his elevation
as carte blanche to turn the clock back and rail against political correctness.

I was struck by three recent stories of the modern US which
probably won’t be remembered like Mrs Obama’s speech, but they all involve African-American
women and they all demonstrate a sickening social malaise which seems to recur
in bouts. No matter how much we think the illness has been cured, it returns
and strikes again.

Dr Tamika Cross, who works at a hospital in Houston, Texas,
was travelling on Delta Airlines when a passenger was taken ill. She claims she
volunteered her services as a medic, but was addressed as ‘sweetie’ by a member
of the cabin crew and told to sit back down, because the flight attendants were
looking for an ‘actual physician’. Once
it eventually dawned on the dim-witted staff member that Cross was, in fact, a
doctor, they still patronised her and deferred to another medically-qualified
passenger, who happened to be a white male.

If her account is true – and there’s little reason to doubt
it – then this is a shocking example of overt racism and sexism. In what
small-minded world might someone’s life be put at risk because of prejudice
over someone who was able to offer medical assistance?

Tasheema Chapman isn’t a doctor and doesn’t have a
professional job. She is a single mother, who works in the Carl Schurz Park in
the Upper East Side of New York City. She makes around $36,000 a year emptying
bins and cleaning up.

Recently, when the park was hosting the Gracie Square Art
Show, her supervisors asked her to clean dog mess off the shoes of one of the
artists who was exhibiting there.
Understandably, she found the experience demeaning and humiliating, but
felt she had no choice. She wanted to keep her job.

Was the fact that she’s a black woman significant here? You
bet it was. Perhaps a white worker would have felt in a stronger position to
argue with their bosses about this ridiculous assignment. And perhaps a white
man would never have been asked in the first place.

The third story I read was about a mother in Chicago, called
Tionna Norris. She received a note from her child’s teacher requesting that she
use less coconut oil in her daughter’s hair, because classmates were
complaining about the smell and teasing her. The young girl, Amia, had curly
locks which needed regular moisture.

Commentators on social media wondered why the teacher wasn’t
more concerned about stopping the teasing and bullying. And her apparent lack of sensitivity to
African-American culture and beauty regimens was thought to show prejudice and
ignorance. There has been some speculation that perhaps she was the one who was concerned and that Amia’s classmates were,
in fact, oblivious to any issue.

Three stories. Not of shootings and beatings and
confrontations with police officers. Just three very different African-American
women encountering ignorant and prejudiced attitudes which the United States
finds so desperately hard to leave behind.

When Michelle Obama made her speech, she did so as the most
powerful and recognisable black woman in the United States. She will know, however, that despite her
husband’s eight-year tenure in the White House, her country still struggles to
come to terms with its history of racism, oppression and slavery.

And then, against this backdrop, comes Donald Trump.

We have reached the end of the democratic road with this
guy.

He cannot win. He must not win.

Thankfully, all the polls now suggest that Hillary is far
and away more likely to triumph on November 8th.

If she doesn’t, it won’t just be a disastrous moment for
American women. It will be a catastrophe for race relations in the United
States too.

There is so much more work to be done. And while it has been
an uphill struggle – even for a man with the courage and conviction of Barack
Obama – it is essential that the US population continues the journey. That
means choosing progress and enlightenment over prejudice and ignorance.